MSI Computer GT62VR Dominator-012 Laptop Review

By Tech For Pennies

September 9, 2016

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A regular laptop won’t really cut it if you want a gaming computer. You will need a great deal of graphics performance which is brought to you by a fast graphics engine. Well, MSI Computer GT62VR Dominator-012 is this kind of a laptop with top-notch dedicated graphics and other goodies. Let me tell you what I think about it below…

Does it work for gaming?

MSI Computer GT62VR Dominator-012 is wonderful for gaming. NVIDIA has released a new set of dedicated graphics cards, and one of them, the GeForce GTX 1060 is installed in this machine. The card comes with 6GB GDDR5 memory, and most interesting thing is how it compares to other cards: early benchmarks suggest it’s faster than GTX 970 but slower than GTX 980. Not bad at all, for example you can run The Witcher 3 on very high settings and receive more than 50FPS on average.

How are the other components?

The essential heavyweight processor, Intel Core i7-6700HQ, takes care of running this system. Its important specs are 2.6GHz clock speed, 3.5GHz turbo boost and four cores. A speedy unit indeed, it beats most other processors with its 8000 score in CPU Mark test. And when you throw in the 32GB DDR4 2400MHz memory this model has installed, no software will be too much for the laptop. You can upgrade the memory to 64 gigabytes but to be honest, nobody should need that much.

The thing with storage drives looks excellent: you are actually getting two drives, a one terabyte 7200RPM 2.5″ SATA drive and a smaller but faster 256GB M.2 SATA solid-state drive. Such a setup is excellent because both huge storage and performance are provided – and naturally both drives can be replaced if you want to.

Ports and connections

It’s understandable that a gamer wants to plug in favorite peripherals, like a mouse, to his laptop. MSI Computer GT62VR Dominator-012 surely offers enough ports: three USB 3.0 and one USB 3.1 Type-C are there for you. Likewise, a couple of video outputs are provided: HDMI and miniDisplayPort.

Networking interfaces are all good, a Gigabit RJ-45 port and WiFi adapter that supports A/C standard and Bluetooth also.

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There’s a 3-in-1 media card reader included (SD format and its variants), however remember that internal optical (DVD) drive is not available.

Other important things to keep in mind

MSI Computer GT62VR Dominator-012 has a high quality screen which probably suffices for gamers. The 15.6″ diagonal offers Full HD resolution and IPS panel with anti-glare coating. The refresh rate for this model is 60hz and it supports G-Sync. The top bezel also houses a webcam that can capture 30FPS 1080p video.

A heavy-duty 8-cell 75Whr internal battery is included, yet as always with these laptops, don’t expect it to last more than 1-2 hours when gaming.

Full-color backlight keyboard is supported.

Summary

If talking purely about the gaming performance, it can’t get much better than MSI Computer GT62VR Dominator-012. The new GeForce GTX1060 handles any game be it high or low settings you’re using, and other components excel at heavyweight software as well. The Full HD display should be beautiful to look at and swift enough to keep up with the requirements of first person shooter games. If you want all that, prepare to dish out a lot of money – this beast is not cheap. But if you got the dough, this MSI is one of the best gaming laptops currently available.